This interview was conducted by Peach Kander over Zoom. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What were the early iterations of Animal Joy like?

In the beginning, I was exploring laughter and American adolescent humor. Eventually, I focused on laughter because that seemed to be the vortex. The writing that would have been my first draft was on a computer that crashed, so the first version of the book disappeared. I lost it completely. I felt liberated in a sense, because I was in a bit of a tangle over what I was writing, how I was writing it. I’m a poet and, at base, I’m interested in creative work. I also have a PhD in literature, so I know how to write academic work, but that’s not really what I’m interested in. So losing the book was a gift. It allowed me to approach the same material very differently.

In the book, you seek out experiences like clown school, laughter yoga, and Merce Cunningham choreography. Was part of seeking those experiences a way of trying to approach the writing differently than strict, maybe more traditional research on literature of laughter?

Yes, I also went to improv shows, storytelling—sorry, this is Siggy [Alsadir’s dog]. Doing research in the world was part of my attempt to keep the work from becoming academic. I wanted to bring the thinking to the body by sitting or walking or moving amongst other bodies. Much of laughter is trans-bodily communication, or interpersonal communication. I wanted to put my body in space with other bodies as part of my exploration. Also, for me, poetry is at base poetry because it moves you, and I’m very invested in this idea of feeling moved, what makes you moved, what makes you feel alive, connected to another person, and much of that is unconscious communication, which is most often transmitted bodily. To really explore laughter in this poetic frame that I was interested in I needed to put my body out there. And then what I found was being in an audience wasn’t enough. That’s when I moved to the other side and got on stage.

The idea of Duchenne and non-Duchenne laughter reoccurs throughout the book. Can you talk a little bit about those distinctions?

Duchenne laughter is body-driven laughter, when you lose it. You get cramps in your stomach, tears are running down your face. And that is usually triggered by something that isn’t necessarily funny, but somehow resonates with something unconscious. The other category scientists divide laughter into is non-Duchenne. Non-Duchenne laughter communicates something outside of speech, something about the interaction at hand, like, this is friendly. I’m happy to see you. There’s no need to be nervous. That kind of laughter evolved when human beings were able to imitate facial expressions and control their voices to a degree. And that is social. It’s manipulative, but not all manipulation is bad. It controls the way other people take interactions. Most laughter is non-Duchenne. I mean, if you think back, when’s the last time you laughed hysterically? We can remember those moments but they don’t happen every day, whereas non-Duchenne laughter occurs multiple times per day.

Are there instances where it’s harder to distinguish? Where there aren’t such clear-cut lines between the two?

Yes. When you look closely, binaries always break down. Sometimes you can laugh at a joke and it’s genuine laughter, but it’s not necessarily a fit of laughter. I would locate that kind of laughter somewhere between the two categories. There are theories about getting a joke where you have a certain kind of pleasure that is pattern recognition. It’s like the pleasure you feel when you put the last piece in a puzzle. There’s a cognitive satisfaction that’s marked by laughter. That can happen with a more prolonged laugh with a joke. There’s a similar kind of satisfaction. Oftentimes, the best jokes require that you supply the punch line with something from your unconscious. When you get it, you’re not only completing the pattern, but you’re also releasing something from the unconscious. There’s a double pleasure, in a sense. There’s the cognitive pleasure, but also any slip from the unconscious is always accompanied by a sense of pleasure in that what had been dammed up is released.

One thing that comes up in the book, in terms of humor and some of what you’re looking at more broadly, is what we use to block the unconscious. What you sometimes refer to as a hole or a kind of nebulousness.

Freud’s idea of trauma is that it occurs when something from the outside world comes at you and you don’t have the capacity to process it. It’s a too-muchness that happens in a moment but lasts a lifetime. If someone gets traumatized, what they try to do unconsciously is to keep anything else from coming at them in the same way. One of the ways to ward off an attack from the external world is through hoarding, to have no open spaces through which anything can enter. A hoard tends to be space that’s filled with known objects that already have emotions attached to them because they belong to the hoarder. Not only is everything already known but there are no openings for the unknown to slip through.

Bion, Beckett’s psychoanalyst, coined the expression “nasty hole.” A “nasty hole,” to him, was an opening where something—the unknown—could come through or come up that was overwhelming. He also talked about space stoppers, things that people use to fill the hole. If you stop up the nasty hole, you’re safe, but it also means that you’re no longer open to the universe. You’re foreclosing your feelings, stopping up the spaces your receptors stretch into, your connection to the universe and whatever it has to offer. You then call up hoarded responses instead, responses that you’re comfortable with, regardless of what is actually before you.

I get into that in the book in relation to what I call perverse thinking. If someone who is healthy has an idea or belief in their mind and encounters evidence in the world that contradicts it, they will change their idea or belief, adjust it to fit reality. If someone who exercises perverse thinking similarly encounters evidence in the world that contradicts their idea or belief, instead of changing their idea or belief to fit the evidence in reality, they will change the evidence itself, pervert or twist it so that the part that doesn’t match up is contorted and out of view. That’s something I talk about a lot in the book in relation to race or stereotypes. It’s different than hoarding, but has the same objective, in a way, which is to live in a stable bunker detached from reality.

You talk about curation too, in terms of how it can block, but also provide a stable sort of psychic experience or framework. How much of that has shifted, living in hyper-mediated experiences through technology, and how much is it part of a spectrum of the human experience?

Along those lines, professional mourners have been in business for centuries. Professional mourners are people hired to cry in a certain way that calls up emotions in other people at a funeral so that they cry in the same direction. Crowd behavior is really complicated and there is a tendency for uncurated emotions to slip through, because we don’t always have the feelings we’re expected to have at the right time. Freud wrote about how common it is for mourners to laugh at funerals. That it’s common is interesting because it speaks to the complex emotions we have in face of a really complex trigger: mortality.

Professional laughers were hired to do something similar initially. They would control the television audience’s responses so that they would take things the right way. For example, I talk in the book about an episode of The Jamie Kennedy Experiment where he’s a yoga instructor and while demonstrating a pose asks for a volunteer to demonstrate it with him. The volunteer—a woman—is doing a downward dog and he stands behind her in a way that’s really sexual. The laugh track that plays in that moment has a really high female voice laughing, which might signal to women, this isn’t a misogynistic moment. She’s not being compromised. This is funny, women can laugh too. Of course, that’s not conscious.

I’m interested in some of what you talk about in the book around strategies or methodologies that can help a person combat that messaging or those manipulations. Like clowning, for example, where the book starts. There is a strategy the teacher has, which is to name people based on the sort of costume they use to hide their true or authentic self. I’m curious about getting to that improvised space.

Part of the fact of being given a clown name, which points to our strategy of controlling other people’s responses to us, is that it highlights how we want to be seen by others or how we need to be seen by others to feel comfortable, so the idea we like of ourselves is remaining intact. But in clown school, what we were being encouraged to do was to move toward the parts of our talent that we weren’t comfortable with, because oftentimes the parts of us that other people appreciate aren’t the same parts that we value or that we want other people to focus on. There’s something about trying to stay in the space that feels safe and affirmed and reinforces our idea of who we are that is dead. It’s like we’re repeating a prototype. But the prototype is our identity.

What are some of the ways that you use to get around that, like as you were writing this book or as you write poetry? Do you have processes that you inhabit to try and find that more alive space?

For me, it hinges on not worrying about how others are going to receive me. Or, imagining my work being received by a figure who understands me, affirms me, is supportive, and curious. That liberates a lot for me.

I realized at a certain point, and I think this was mostly in clown school, that my desire to control how other people saw me was actually limiting who I was. I was giving off what I thought worked in the past and would be affirmed, but, in that context, it didn’t work because it wasn’t alive. It felt rehearsed, fake, inhibited. But when I expanded to the unknown parts of myself and received reactions from people that were new, that I couldn’t anticipate, I suddenly felt more alive. I felt like I was discovering something. I feel the same way when I’m writing. I write to figure something out, not to argue or prove something I already know.

You talk about Winnicott throughout, but I’m specifically thinking of his theories around safe environment, especially as modeled by the infant-mother relationship. And the mother’s reaction affecting the infant’s self-perception and the perception of the mother as a fully self-possessed, self-contained entity.

It’s a holding environment that he talks about, which is a space where you can express the full range of your emotions without being punished. Another interesting thing he talks about in relation to safety—and, ironically, in praise of destructive impulses—is in his paper “The Use of an Object.” In brief, the infant attacks the mother, is ruthless with the mother, and the mother—ideally—doesn’t retaliate but does show that she’s hurt. If the infant is aggressive and attacking, and the mother gets that way in response, then the infant has gotten inside of her and is controlling her from within. The mother is acting like the infant. And then there is no mother, there’s only the infant who is omnipotent and goes inside of other people and acts from within their bodies, which means there is no other person there to help. If, on the other hand, the mother doesn’t retaliate, but is hurt, then it is clear that the mother is separate, and can step in and do something. But if the mother isn’t separate, then the mother is only capable of giving what the infant already has.

The extrapolation is that in relationships, in order to love and be loved, you have to be separate. And sometimes it’s hard to be separate. But for two people to have a real meaningful relationship, they have to be able to take each other’s ruthlessness without, you know, being controlled from within and acting in the same way, retaliating. Instead, they ideally have their own reaction and that indicates that they are separate. And if they’re separate, they can be of use and help find a way to get through the conflict.

You use your own life a lot throughout the book. Did you have any rules or boundaries around that?

I didn’t have very much from my life in the first version of the book. And it didn’t feel alive and creative. At a certain point I decided in order to write the kind of book I wanted to write, I had to write it the way I would write poetry. And when I write poetry, it comes out of my life but it’s not always narrativizing my life. This book, too, comes out of my life. There are pieces of my life. But there isn’t really that much biographically or narratively about me, even as there’s a lot from me. It’s similar with the people I work with in therapy and analysis. They don’t necessarily know that much about my life, the details of it, but they know the way my mind moves, they know how I think. And that is very intimate. In many ways, they know me better than the people who know me in the world, who know a lot about me, where I live, the facts about my history and my existence.

One of the pleasures of the book for me as a reader, that felt really affirming to me, was the emphasis on process and the experience of creativity. Writing toward understanding rather than being goal-oriented. In my own life I’ve been trying to do that more. Taking ceramics has really helped because you don’t just go from zero to finished mug.

I used to make ceramics. You go back to something, but it has its own volition. Like sometimes, because of the way you’ve wedged the clay, it can want to move in a direction that’s different than the direction you’d envisioned. And then what do you do? Do you let the clay become what it wants to be and the object become what it wants to be? Or do you try and force it? If you force it, you mess it up. And then you’re back to square one. Usually, it somehow breaks down. Or cracks when it’s fired. We can be that way in life. We can look at ourselves as clay and accept that our clay wanted to move in a specific direction. Or force a different direction and set ourselves up to crack, break down. If you work in a studio that’s communal, sometimes people will put the wrong clay in a bin that’s supposed to be recycling one kind of clay and they mess it up because they didn’t care. In creating with one another, even if you never see the other people, you’re still living with their decisions.